NEW YORK — Now that the survival of his candidacy is at stake, Joe Biden spoke with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos on Friday for one of the most important interviews of the Democratic president’s decades-long political career.
The 22-minute conversation took place eight days into Biden’s presidency. disastrous debate performancein which more than 50 million people watched the 81-year-old struggle to finish sentences or answer basic questions about his campaign. Far fewer people watched the ABC interview, of course, but the audience included many of the elected officials, donors and political strategists who will be actively deciding whether to save or end Biden’s candidacy in the coming days. Biden’s top advisers have pressured elected Democrats not to go public with their concerns.
The president and his team hoped that this first interview would help unite his party and generate momentum for the long road ahead. It is unclear whether he was successful.
Here are some key conclusions:
At this point, every answer, interview and speech Biden gives will serve as a kind of Rorschach test for voters, who consistently tell pollsters they worry about his age. And if people were looking for further signs of trouble, they would be easy to find.
Biden outperformed him on the debate stage. There were also flashes of power as the president touted his record, vowed not to quit the race and fired shots at Donald Trumpwhom he repeatedly described as a “pathological liar.” Biden also at one point called Trump a “congenital liar.”
But he had to do much more than meet the incredibly low bar he set on national television last week. And the ABC interview included several instances of awkward pauses, slurred words and moments where he wandered off.
In one of the interview’s opening answers, Biden struggled to clearly explain whether he was aware of how bad his debate performance was as it happened in real time, jumping from his preparation to polls to Trump’s lies during the debate to blaming no one.
Trump allies seized on another response from Biden, in which he suggested he wasn’t sure whether he had rewatched his debate performance. “I don’t think so,” Biden said.
When Biden was asked repeatedly whether he would resign, he gave no indication that he would bow to pressure within his party and withdraw from the presidential race.
He refused to even consider the possibility. In fact, he offered only one exception: “If the Lord Almighty comes down and tells me, I could do it.”
That was even as Stephanopoulos presented him with various data points and shared “the prevailing sentiment” from his conversations with party officials. “They are worried about you and the country. And they don’t think you can win. They want you to leave with grace,” the journalist said.
Biden resisted.
“The vast majority are not where those people are,” he said. “Have you ever seen a moment when elected officials running for office aren’t a little concerned?”
The bottom line is that Biden has no good explanation for his poor performance in the debates.
In the interview, he called it “a bad episode,” but said there was no evidence of a “more serious condition.” Instead, he said he just had “a really bad cold.” When questioned again, he said, “I just had a bad night.”
He also blamed no one but himself, even as rumors surfaced in recent days about his staff and those coordinating his preparations.
Such an answer will of course do little to convince those who have grave concerns about his physical and mental prowess. He also refused to undergo medical tests that might further assuage such concerns.
Stephanopoulos specifically asked whether Biden would agree to an “independent medical evaluation that included neurological and cognitive testing.” He asked more than once, but Biden did not directly respond.
“Look, I have a cognitive test every day. I have that test every day,” Biden said. “Everything I do. I’m not just campaigning, I’m running the world.”
If Biden’s advisers had picked Stephanopoulos for the president’s first major post-debate interview, hoping he wouldn’t make things too difficult for him, they were wrong.
Stephanopoulos, who served as an adviser to former President Bill Clinton decades ago, peppered the Democratic president with tough questions and blunt truths, but did so in a gentle tone.
When Biden suggested he had recently drawn large crowds, Stephanopoulos responded: “I don’t think you want to play the crowd game. Donald Trump can draw large crowds.”
Biden seemed a little nervous at times.
The president paused when Stephanopoulos asked if he knew “how bad things were” during the debate. He paused again later when Stephanopoulos asked if he was acting like Trump by “putting his personal interests above the national interest” by staying in the race.
In another conversation, Biden asked Stephanopoulos whether the polls are still as accurate as they used to be.
It was meant as a rhetorical question. But the interviewer answered quickly.
“I don’t think so, but I think if you look at all the polls, it shows that he’s definitely ahead in the popular vote, probably even more ahead in the battleground states,” Stephanopoulos said of Trump. “And one of the other important factors is that it shows that in many of the battleground states, the Democrats running for Senate and House are doing better than you are.”
Biden didn’t ask many rhetorical questions beyond that.
Even before the interview ended, it was clear that much more would be needed to convince a party suddenly open to alternatives to Biden just four months before Election Day.
Around the same time ABC released the first interview clip, Congressman Mike Quigley (D-Ill.) became the fourth Democratic congressman to call on Biden to withdraw from the race.
“To avoid total catastrophe,” Quigley said on MSNBC, “you have to step down and let someone else do this.”
Democrats are being encouraged by the White House and the president’s campaign not to make public their concerns about Biden’s viability or electability, according to a Democrat who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the matter.
Another Democrat watching said he thought Biden was shaky and predicted more votes would be cast for him to withdraw from the race.
Biden, for his part, refused to entertain the possibility that congressional leaders might confront him in the coming days and ask him to step aside. But as Stephanopoulos has repeatedly said, that is indeed a very real possibility. Earlier this week, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia reached out to fellow senators to discuss whether Biden should be asked to withdraw from the race.
Biden said Warner is “a good person” but also brought up the Virginian’s past considerations about running for president.
When asked how he would feel if he lost the race next January, Biden’s answer may not exactly inspire confidence.
“As long as I gave it my all and did the best job I could, that’s what matters,” he said.
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Associated Press journalists Lisa Mascaro and Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington contributed to this report.